Small Scale Guide: Preliminaries

Brew Estradiol or Testosterone

Warning

This guide creates injectables. This injectable is designed to go into your body, bypassing the wonderful filtration system of your digestive organs. Injectable preparations are inherently more dangerous than topicals or orals. Do not skip steps. Do not skimp on prices. You want to do this, so do it right, the first time.

Please contemplate if you’re capable of doing this process correctly before beginning.

Scale

This guide is designed to create roughly 10mL of your target preparation.

It can do more but it’s stretching the capabilities of the equipment and you start encountering more safety issues and considerations. Consider upgrading to the medium guide if you need more than a couple small vials for personal use.

Bare-Bones Guide

This guide is completely bare-bones. I’ve stripped out everything that’s not completely essential. This is because this is a harm-reduction based guide that’s meant to make your personal homebrewing as easy and accessible as possible while still staying safe.

You can up your game by reading the medium scale guide and taking tools and methodologies from there.

Other Guides

I don’t recommend any other guides for this procedure. There’s a lot of bad info out there.

DIY vials are a science, not an art. While there will always be a difference in opinion, I know we can collectively step up our game. Just because people “aren’t getting hurt” by the current state of DIY doesn’t mean it’s adequate. I believe that in some circumstances there could be longterm health consequences to poor technique.

Small Guide Contents

• Defining and gathering supplies
• Building a work area
• Preparing materials
• Mixing preparation
• Filtering into small vials you’ll later inject from
• Using bubble point tests to ensure filter integrity
• Visual exam

Pre-Brew Education

Please read up before beginning this process

• Read this whole guide start to finish
• Make a list of how this guide is different from what you’ve done in the past
• Explore the items in “Topics” area of the sidebar to improve your knowledge

Science-Mind

When you homebrew you’re doing something that is highly regulated and whose secrets are highly guarded. It’s also pretty dangerous to cook something in your kitchen and then to inject it into your own body. You’ll be best served if you adopt a science mindset as you move forward. Ask as many questions as you can about why things are they way they are. Ask if things are safe or not. Ask why we know if they’re safe or not. Keep this up and never stop.

You should be thrilled to learn that there’s a better way to do something. Treat every failure as a success because your set of knowledge just got broader. Be cautious of people with homebrew knowledge who are highly defensive and who have no data to back up why what they do is “safe.”

Accidental skin contact

Be aware that gloves should be worn while following this guide. All people can have their hormone profile interfered with if they make accidental skin contact with what they’re brewing. If you are a person who has hormone cycles, or a person who is on testosterone to suppress those cycles, you may notice that accidental skin contact is detrimental to that cycle.

You will come into contact with this preparation, and you need to have PPE protecting you.

A lot can go wrong here, I’ve seen it first hand. Protect yourself.

Create a guide summary

Preparing for the day of your brew, you should have a personal summary of this guide written out so you don’t have to refer to a website constantly.

Notes of safety

Some safety decisions have to be made.

Most brew guides will direct you to make 10mL vials at a high concentration such as 40mg/mL. While this is super convenient for making a single vial last you around 80 weeks, there are some large safety concerns with this.

The FDA recommends that once you puncture a vial, that you discard it after a mere 28 days. A deviation of this size is too large to ignore. While we know that those in the DIY community seem to have perfectly fine results from doing this, we don’t know if it’s actually safe or not. Even with the best technique, over time you will be degrading the stopper and introducing bacteria into the vial.

80 weeks feels excessive to me for this. If you, instead, make a 5ml vial of 20mg/mL concentration, you’re looking at a vial that lasts you around 20 weeks. While 20 weeks is still way over the 28 day threshold thats recommended, it’s at least a bit saner of a stretch.

I prefer vials that are 3mL and 20mg/mL concentration, and thus last around 12 weeks.

Figure out what makes sense for you.

Decide on your recipe

Head over the recipe calculator and calculate your recipe. For this specific methodology I’d suggest you make 1 or 2 5mL vials of 20mg/mL Estradiol or 200mg/mL Testosterone. At average dosing, a 5mL vial will last you about 5 months.

Brew at least an extra 5mL more than you plan on dispensing into vials to account for loss to the filter etc.